Did you always want to be a writer?
I I didn’t start out to be a writer. I started out as a kid in
New Jersey who had two major goals in life: (1) survive one more year
of delivering newspapers without being attacked by Ike, the one-eyed,
crazed cur that lurked in the forsythia bushes at the top of the hill;
and (2) become more than a weak-hitting, third string catcher on our
sorry Little League team. I failed at both.
Had I announced at the dinner
table, “Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to be
a poet,” my parents—especially my mother--would have been thrilled.
In truth, they would have been thrilled that I’d decided to be anything
other than the Top 40 disc jockey, Edsel salesman, or bullpen catcher I constantly
talked about becoming in junior high. But at that point in my life, poetry—and
school, in general, for that matter--meant no more to me than gerunds, the Belgian
Congo, or George Washington’s wooden teeth. I was only “gifted” on
Christmas and my birthday.
I think you see that, at that point in my life, being
a writer wasn’t on
my radar screen. Not even close.
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